Amazon is building a new HQ, reports KIRO TV (via Business Insider) and is targeting LEED-Silver green-building certification. What, on earth, is LEED certification? I had no clue, and couldn’t help but not fall asleep reading the Wikipedia entry, so I did a search in trying to find a video, and lo and behold, as is usually the case, I stumbled across one of our own videos on LEED, which was part of a three-part series on the whole green theme:
MySpace is certainly this generation’s MTV. So it was pretty fitting that Sumner Redstone would seek to acquire MySpace, of course, as history would have it, Mr. Redstone’s foe Rupert Murdoch stepped in, outbid Viacom, and lo and behold, MySpace fell in News Corp.’s domain.
MySpace has gone on to become the largest music community, no doubt, and now they will have to give both Amazon and Apple’s iTunes a run for its money. Amazon is in the running to be powering the “Buy Music” function of the ad-supported site, by the way.
This should be getting interesting. Read more here and here. Tech Crunch is running with the rumor that MySpace will pull a Hulu and raise private equity/VC money and essentially spin off MySpace Music. Thus far, this paid off with Hulu, though I don’t think anyone within NBC or News Corp. (the owners of the joint venture that is Hulu) really know what the end game / outcome / exit will look like… but in a world where YouTube generated 5B monthly streams and owns the video space, who cares about end games and outcomes right now?
For this reason, considering just how bloodied the music industry has been, and the fact that Apple and Amazon basically own the online music, Rupert Murdoch’s strategy of opening up MySpace Music and sharing ownership with the media companies that own the intellectual property (the muzzak) is a wise bet, after all, Hulu’s content library was helped considerably thanks to NBC and News Corp.’s vaults.
Twitter accepted some money from Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos. The latter is interested because long ago I wrote that Twitter was far more of an e-commerce play than an ad play… but given the $150B US / $500B global advertising market, everyone and their cousin wants to have an advertising-based business model… which explains why most companies tend to rewrite their business plans of late (in other words: they have no business having an ad model, but I digress).
Anyway, I think this is the first step towards Amazon.com buying Twitter… it just makes more sense to use something like Twitter in a commercial capacity than a communications capacity, which is odd because Twitter now bills itself as a “communications utility”. Whatever floats their boat…
Today, the vanity crowd uses Twitter in the way that they do, in 5 years - if Twitter is around - it will be used as a commercial platform. Mark my words.
I was reading SI on the NFL Draft and how random it is: which players become successful vs. which ones flop.
Business is the same, here is a good post on Tech Crunch about Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Mind you, it helps to have a maniacal leader in Jeff Bezos who will win at all costs.
Amazon.com is taking on Ze French by trying to offer consumers free shipping. On the surface, you wonder, why is the French government upset? But looking at the nuances in the matter, I agree with the French.
Booksellers have complained about Amazon.com’s decision to waive S&H, the matter has gone to court and Amazon has lost. It has been forced to pay a $1,000 fine every day for 30 days, after which point the Courts could lower or raise the fine. Amazon is trying to reverse the rule:
Cédric Manara, a law professor and e-commerce specialist at Edhec, a French business school in Nice, said he would not be surprised if the court raised the penalty, and that Amazon “had no chance” with its appeal.
The law is “really clear,” Manara said. “There is no way you can read the text to find a different result. And the court would have evidence of the firm’s deliberate will to violate the law.” A similar law regulating the price of books in Germany does not affect free shipping for Amazon.de, Mantello said.
The 1981 Lang law was passed at a time when booksellers were losing sales to supermarkets and other new competitors. It was meant to assure that the French public had equal access to a wide variety of books, both high-brow and low-brow, not just heavily marked-down publications.
The law has twice come before the European Court of Justice and both times it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard, Manara said.
Is it just me or should Amazon simply offer a bigger rebate to offset the S&H fee?
On the one hand, I like that Amazon.com is sticking to its guns and trying to lower price and what not, but at the heart of the ruling is a mechanism to protect competition, so I think Amazon.com is not helping itself with its arrogance in the matter.
They are helping in the short-term but in the long-term they will end up driving many of the small, mom and pop-style booksellers out of business and in turn, Amazon.com would control what books the French can and cannot read.
For this reason, Amazon.com will lose the case, again.
The risk it runs, frankly, is to come across as a “arrogant American company” telling France what to do… and that might create much more badwill than Amazon.com bargained for.
What ever happened to think global, act local Jeff?
2007 will go down as the year of the book. All right, that’s a blatantly false statement, but it does make for a good headline, no?
Maybe 2008 will earn that title. After all, what gathers steam and momentum in one year can always trace its roots to the previous year, no?
In 2007, Amazon launched Kindle, a wanna-be iPod for books. Also this year, you are certainly seeing more and more book-related ventures:
- Goodreads: which according to Tech Crunch helps you find that perfect book.
- Red Room: a social network for authors, read more on Paid Content.
I am sure there are more. But the point is, ironic that one of the first web startups, Amazon.com, sought to tackle the book industry yet we seem to now focus mainly on music and movies. Maybe a sign of things to come?
Probably. Read my previous post on The Publisher of the 21t Century.
Odd that a bunch of newspaper and magazine journalists and bloggers (yours truly included) wrote one thing or another about Amazon.com’s Kindle, but no one figured this out.
Well, no one until Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka:
Amazon’s Kindle offers readers a chance to pay to read online newspapers? We haven’t spent time talking about it, because it’s so clearly a non-starter.
But for the record: If you want to read the New York Times on your Kindle, you can pay $14 a month for a subscription — or you can read it for free, using the Kindle’s built-in web browser and all-you-can-eat wireless access. (Other papers like the Wall Street Journal, le Monde, etc, are also available at different but equally preposterous price points.)
That’s precious. Read the rest of the Kafka-esque post here.
The late 1990s brought us Jeff Bezos, who pioneered a new e-commerce model and changed the dynamics of book sales for good. What Bezos failed to do, however, was change the dynamics of book publishing itself.
The 2000s brought us Steve Jobs (again), who pioneered music sales and changed the dynamics of the music industry for good. While conventional wisdom states that the music industry is dying, that is actually not true. Quoting MSFT’s J Allard, who runs Zune:
The music industry is very healthy. The record industry is the problem. The notion that the only way to monetize artist creation is 10 songs that come out every 18 months, in a package called an album — the classic record model — isn’t what it used to be. [Musicians can profit from] reality shows. Fashion. Maybe I release five or six tracks and the rest comes in a paid subscription, that is basically a fan club…. Most labels are going to become management companies [making money from booking concerts, etc. rather than selling CDs.] There will be a lot of pain.
In fact, he is right. Similarly, the book publishing was not really revitalized thanks to Amazon, if anything, Amazon exposed the real challenges with book publishing even though the Web probably has done more than any other variable to get people to read more and have letters, words and phrases closer to them than ever before.
Today, we ask if Jeff Bezos will change that by taking books into the digital age, once and for all.
According to this article, the past two days’ gains boosted Amazon.com’s market capitalization — the value of all the shares trading in the public domain — from $18.3 billion to $25.7 billion, a gain of about $7.4 billion.
But more importantly, for Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon.com in 1994, that meant the value of his 101.3 million shares in the company jumped in value from $4.53 billion to $6.36 billion, a gain of roughly $1.8 billion.
Translation: Bezos owns 25%. I thought by now he would be down to 10-15%, but I guess it helps that he used debt financing early on.
Amazon’s stock price is deserving of a book story of its own. The stock peaked on Dec. 10, 1999 at $106.69. Then, the stock lost 94% of its value over roughly the next 22 months before bottoming at $5.97 on Sept. 28, 2001. Since then, the stock is up 951%. His net worth has been all over the place from $10.1 billion in 1999, according to Forbes, to $1.5 billion in 2002. Last year, Forbes said he was worth $4.3 billion.
Since 1994, we have seen many companies come out of nowhere, off the radar, only to grow into positions of leadership and dominate their sphere. Some go on and galvanize that leadership positions, others falter and let someone else pass by.The following is HipMojo.com’s list of Internet Company of the Year, based on growth, market leadership, traction, strength of management, prospects and overall accomplishments.
All right, time for the envelopes, and the winners are:
1994: AOL.com
The year 1994 marked the appearance of ISPs across the web landscape. By August 1994, AOL merged with Redgate (a multimedia publishing company specializing in CD-ROMs), and a couple of months later, in November, AOL declared war on Microsoft, betting the farm on an online strategy. This marks the beginning of the rise of the Web versus the desktop theme. AOL begins to mail out millions of CDs trying to win over the masses. It works. AOL becomes the fastest growing ISP ever, surpassed only by Japanese wireless service provider iMode a decade later.
1995: Netscape
Netscape was created by Mosaic Communicatyions Corporation on April 4, 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. On October 13 1994, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was launched, and renamed Netscape Navigator shortly thereafter. But it was on August 9, 1995 that Netscape went public, offering shares at $14 and closing at $75. In doing so, it ushered in the first wave of the World Wide Web’s golden era.
1996: Altavista
AltaVista remains a poster boy for the “what could have been” lot. It was launched on December 15, 1995 by its parent company DEC, but given its pedigree, it was used primarily as a showcase for DEC’s computing power. In 1996 however, it became Yahoo!’s exclusive search provider, and by 1998 was sold to Compaq, who then began the even-more-misguided plan to remake the search engine into a portal. By then, of course, Google was rising amongst pure-play search engines. In March 2004, Yahoo! bought Overture, who had previously bought Altavista; Overture itself is the runner-up for the “what could have been” prize.
1997: eBay
The “Candy dispenser story” is created by eBay’s PR manager, which changes its name from AuctionWeb to eBay. In 1997, the company captures the imagination of the masses, the next year the stock goes public, like many dot com entrepreneurs, founder Pierre Omidyar becomes a billionaire. Unlike most, thanks to eBay’s 80% profit margins, Omidyar remains a billionaire to this day.
1998: Yahoo!
Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 and incorporated a year later on March 2, 1995. It grew reasonably quickly from the onset, and on April 12, 1996, the company’s IPO raised $33.8M for growth opportunities. The subsequent year, in 1997, it acquired Four11 and its Rocketmail service, which became Yahoo! Mail. The rest, as they say, is history: in 1998 the stock rose from a split-adjusted $4 to $40, cementing its spot as the future leader of web media. In October 1998, it made its first acquisition, that of Yoyodyne, by 1999 it was acquiriing larger firms, first Geocities (1999), then eGroups (2000). Yahoo! could have also been named 2003’s Internet Company of the Year, in all fairness, since that’s when it started its resurgence.
1999: Amazon.com
In December 1999, when Time Warner (still separate from AOL) published its end-of-year issue of Time magazine, it put Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on its cover for Man of the Year. While cracks had began to appear in the Web facade, the fact was that no one, and we mean no one, saw the storm that was brewing around the corner. Amazon.com was still a money-losing enterprise, but one that was widely believed to be making a run to acquire venerable retailer Walmart. Yes, you read that correctly. Today Walmart is worth 10 times more than Amazon.com. But within weeks of that cover issue, publisher of Time magazine Time Warner merged with AOL, ushering in the beginning of the end.
2000: Lycos
Launched in 1995 by Bob Davis, Lycos grew to become the most visited portal in the world by 1999. It was sold to Terra in May 2000, for $12.5B. By 2004, South Korea’s Daum Communications paid $95.4 million - less than 1% of Terra’s buyout price. What could have been was, came and went and Lycos today is an asterix of the Web’s go-go days… but Davis legacy remains somewhat unscathed as the architect of one of the premier brands of the Web’s first era of prosperity. Today Davis is a VC, Lycos is Korean.
2001: Napster
Napster was built in 1999, it spread like wildfire in 2000, but it peaked in 2001. Shortly thereafter, it was forced into submission by the RIAA and the record labels, but the genie was out of the bag, paving the way for decentralized P2P file sharing sites like Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh and Bearshare. Napster was at the time the fastest growing consumer application, ever.
2002: Google
The year 2002 could be seen as an innocuous one for Google and in many ways, we’ll admit that we could have picked Google in any year. But since other companies had their standout years in specific years, we picked Google for 2002 for a few, well, innocuous reasons. After all, by 2002, the Web had just suffered its devastating crash, and while many dot com dreams had gone up in flames, one company emerged largely unscathed and perfectly positioned to benefit from it: hiring cheap and smart labor and investing in the super powerful computer it is today. That year Google’s revenue grew 409% from 2001, but 2002 was also the last year Google’s revenues were below $1B per year, coming in at $439M. Somewhat more interestingly, that year marked the last year Google’s ending headcount stood below 1,000, finishing 2002 with 682 Googlers, by the end of 2003, Google employed 1,682 people, and today it employs over 10,000. That year also saw the shift of Google from a “simple” search application to the search and advertising powerhouse it is today: the next year, it scooped up companies that added to its lethal search algorithm: first Applied Semantics in April 2003, then Sprinks in October 2003, right before it began to plan for an IPO, in August, 2004.
2003: Cisco
The network is the computer, and no company has benefited more from that than Cisco Systems, the stock that outperformed all others, and won our Top 10 Web / High Tech Stocks of Past, Present and Future (link below). In some ways, Cisco should not make this list, but since we’re looking at Internet company of the year, then it’s unfair not to give Cisco some credit, especially since they are the ones selling the shovels and hats to the many entrepreneurs and investors looking to succeed on the Web. In 2003, long after the bubble burst, Cisco’s stock rose from $13 to $24, nearly doubling and effectively ushering the return of the Web.
2004: Skype
Skype’s history can be traced back to 2002 when Draper Investment Company invested in the company, which was founded by the entrepreneurs behind Kazaa, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The Skype domain names were only registered in April 2003, with the first beta version coming on the heels of that in August 2003. But by October 2005, eBay paid $4B for Skype. Oh, in between, Skype revolutionized communications and scaled to millions of concurrent users, after hitting 1M concurrent users in 2004, 2005 saw them hit 4M concurrent users.
2005: MySpace
MySpace was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. As one of the leading and more visible players of the social networking landscape, it silenced all the critics many times over: first when it overtook Friendster as the largest social networking site, then when News Corp. paid $580M for MySpace parent Intermix in July 2005 and then when it went on to triple in size after Rupert Murdoch took over the asset and created Fox Interactive Media around it. Today, MySpace is the largest web property when measured by pageviews, with its 100 millionth user profile having been created in August 2006. We dubbed MySpace the greatest Web acquisitions ever after Google paid News Corp. $900M in an ad deal for rights to power its search engine and run contextual search ads.
2006: YouTube
YouTube went from 0 to $1.65B in eighteen months. Founded by three former Paypal employees and funded by members of Paypal who relocated to the Sequoia venture capital group, YouTube meshed user generated content with tagging to create the fastest growing startup, ever. The company secured $11.5 million from Sequoia and cashed out when Google made an all-stock bid for the company in Q4 2006.
2007: Facebook
Facebook opened its site up to the non-college crowd in September 2006, by springtime, when they announced their developer program, Facebook was clearly the “it” company of the year, despite being the second social networking site behind MySpace.com. Facebook’s growth spiraled rapidly as the 25-34 demographic connected with old friends via the site. Throughout the year, the paper valuation of the company spiraled from $2-4B, up to $6B, then $10B, ultimately settling at $15B with a $240M investment for 1.6% stake from Microsoft. Additional investors were Li Ka-shing - East Asia’s richest person - and then the Samwer brothers (in 2008). The company faced some turbulence with privacy woes, its Beacon advertising program was practically a disaster… but by year’s end, Facebook was breathing down MySpace’s neck and partnered with the world’s most valuable technology company.
Who’s your pick for 2008? Vote in the comments.
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